Archive | December, 2016

We are always on the hunt for great plugins, and we love to share our findings in order to save others time with research. Last month, we needed to find affiliate plugins for a client we were working with, and after a lengthy search of reading reviews, and trying the plugins out, here are our top three choices. But first, let’s define what an affiliate plugin is.

What is an Affiliate Program?

Have you ever noticed when visiting a website that they have Amazon ads at the bottom? Those are called affiliates. An affiliate program allows other websites to post a link to your site, and then the other sites pay you commission for each time someone clicks on their site, or buys one of their products. In the example above, if you choose to run Amazon ads on your website, Amazon will pay you commission if a person coming from your site buys something on Amazon.

Affiliate programs can work for virtually anything. If you have a website for dentist reviews, dentists can pay you for referring them on your website. If you have a blog about home improvement, you can link contractor websites on your own site, and they will have to pay you every time someone clicks on their ad.

Benefits of an Affiliate Program

There are various benefits to joining an affiliate program. Tipsandtricks-hq.com lists the following:

Increased sales
Drive traffic to your site
Generate qualified leads
Extend the reach of your brand
Better search engine rankings
The ultimate viral marketing strategy

Three Top WordPress Affiliate Plugins

WordPress Affiliate Platform Plugin

If you have read our other blogs, you know that we are a huge proponent of using WordPress. Their affiliate platform plugin is an easy way to start an affiliate program. You can use the plugin to recruit affiliates, pay them commission, and then manage and track the progress. The plugin is pretty easy to use; you basically create banners and links which are posted on others’ websites, and then you can see how each website is doing, and how much traffic each site is bringing to you. The program will even figure out and pay commission for you.

These are the features that are listed on their site:

• Launch your affiliate campaign in a short time.
• Monitor clicks and conversions of visitors sent by your affiliates.
• Maintain your brand with your own product Ad Banners and Links.
• Drive more traffic to your landing/sales page from your Affiliate’s site.
• Significantly BOOST revenue with more sales.

Magic Affiliate

This is a great plugin that is integrated with WooCommerce. It claims to make your website a fully-automated membership site for affiliates. The developers claim that it’s very easy to use; the only thing you’d need to do is activate the plugin through WordPress and be using the plugin in minutes. It’s not hard for novices to figure out, as there are no codes involved. Probably their best sales push is that you can try them out for free. They offer a 30-day money back guarantee if you are not satisfied.

It’s easy to integrate with WooCommerce, WP e-commerce, as well as AWeber, GetResponse, Constant Contact, iContact and MailChimp, and is compatible with Magic Members WordPress Membership Plugin.

While the affiliate above allows you to make manual payments, Magic affiliate lets you make PayPal Mass payments automatically, which is a huge time saver.

WooCommerce Amazon Affiliates – WordPress Plugin

Everyone knows that Amazon is the biggest deal in online retail. If you have a working site, you may want to consider partnering up with Amazon to earn commission from them. This plugin allows you to do so safely and easily. You can actually create your own store on your e-commerce site, and sell products directly from Amazon. You can earn up to 10% commission from Amazon’s million affiliate program items. And during special promotions, you can even earn up to 25% in commissions.

Here are some other great features, as listed on their support page:

• Choose from any Amazon Location – Worldwide, Amazon Germany, Amazon United Kingdom, Amazon Canada, Amazon France, Amazon Japan, Amazon India, Amazon Italy, Amazon China, Amazon Spain.
• 90 days cookies feature – With this feature, when a user is redirected to amazon, the product is automatically added to cart and kept there for 90 days (this boosts your conversions also!).
• On Site Cart feature! This option will allow your customers to add multiple Amazon Products into Cart and checkout trough Amazon’s system with all at once!
• Prices setup – Select if you want to import prices only from Seller Amazon, or from other sellers as well (get lowest price)
• Products Variations – Get product variations. Be careful about Yes All variations as one product can have a lot of variation. With this, execution time is dramatically increased!
• Great SEO content for your products, our WooCommerce Amazon Affiliates – WordPress Plugin takes all data available for all Amazon products: Title, Prices (regular prices, sales prices and all prices variations), all products attributes, product reviews and full products descriptions.

Contact Behla Design

Our team at Behla Design, Graphic Design & Web Development, is dedicated to creating visual experiences that effectively tell our clients’ stories while engaging, exciting, and enticing their customers. Our firm consists of top web design, web development, WordPress, search engine optimization (SEO), and copywriting professionals and has worked in the graphic, print and web design industry for over twenty years. Contact us today to find out how we can help your next project.

Do you have unique items to sell, found a great wholesale deal on terrific products, or simply wish to make an extra income? Have you considered opening up an e-commerce store? Nowadays, it’s easier than ever to make money online. We help clients every day by explaining how to start an online business. By reading this blog, you can partake in some of our knowledge and how we’ve helped our clients achieve the success they desire.

Benefits of an Online Business

There are so many great benefits to starting an online business. The first advantage is saving money. A physical store entails many processes like signing a multi-year lease, paying rent and utilities, and hiring salespeople, etc. On top of that, you need to invest money into furniture and decor for the store or business and other expenses. With an online business, you don’t need any of that. You can work from anywhere while you start out, even in your own garage.

The second benefit to starting an online business is that you get to work from home. This means you get to spend more time with your family members and have time to pick up your kids from school, if you prefer. You can even make money online while in your pajamas! Furthermore, you don’t have to spend money on gas driving to and from work, lunch at work, and so on.

But perhaps the biggest benefit to starting an online business is that your items will be available to people all over the world. With a physical location, only people in that neighborhood or city will come to shop or use your services. With an online store, there are no boundaries to where your clients can live.

How to Start an Online Business with WordPress

So you want to work from home and make money online? Follow these five steps that will teach you how to start an online business.

WordPress theme

1. Create a Website – We are huge fans of WordPress. This free web software allows anyone, whether novice or expert, to create a site for their needs. All you need to do is first find a host that is compatible with WordPress. That is not hard to do, as there are thousands of options to choose from. Then, you can download and sign up for a WordPress account. This will take no more than five minutes.

WordPress has numerous support forums online and countless YouTube videos that explain different features to help you customize your online business website. Thousands of plugins are also compatible with WordPress, some free and some paid, and these are very easy to upload and edit. Read some of our other posts to find out what other steps you can take to customize and improve your site with content writing, search options, shipping options, etc.

2. Use Search Engine Optimization (SEO) – This is probably the most important thing you can do apart from building a great, easy-to-use website, and offering great products or services, according to Entrepreneur. SEO means doing research to optimize your website to register and come up in Google searches. Say you sell clothes online. How are you going to compete with thousands of other e-commerce stores that sell clothes? You will do so by researching which keywords or terms potential clients are searching for.

Keyword planner from Google Adwords is a great, free tool at your disposal. You need to enter a term that you think your buyers would search for, such as True Religion jeans, and you will see how many monthly searches that term has, and what the competition for that term is. Competition just means how many other sites are optimizing for that same keyword; Google will tell you if the competition is low, medium, or high. You want to pick keywords with the most searches and the least amount of competition.

3. Register your business – Many people don’t know about this crucial step, but if you want to make money online, you need to get a license. The U.S. Small Business Association (SBA) is a great resource on the laws and regulations in each state. Remember that there are federal, state and local regulations for businesses, even if you work from home to make money online.  “If you are operating your online business in a state that charges a sales tax; or levies a gross receipts or excise tax on businesses you may have to apply for a tax permit or otherwise register with your state revenue agency,” according to the SBA. “Online businesses are responsible for collecting state and local sales taxes from their customers when applicable, and paying these taxes to state and local revenue agencies.”

4. Make a Business Plan – You may just start out selling, say, your collection of baseball memorabilia, but what if your online business truly takes off? What if you run of out merchandise, but have a high demand? What if you need to expand quickly, hire staff, or rent warehouse space? Even though you make money online, you need to have a solid business plan for your website. Small Business BC will guide you how to setup a successful plan.

5. Become an Expert – You may sell products that are available on other websites, or services that others may find elsewhere, but what can set you apart is your expertise. Setting yourself up as an expert is not difficult on your website. Write blogs or articles that have relevance to what you’re offering. If you’re selling green products for example, share important news about alternatives to common products that can promote a green lifestyle. Share your own stories about your experiences and post pictures. Chances are, someone on your website will like what they read, and they will start to follow you. Then, they will be a client for life.

Need Help in Your Online Business?

The Behla Design is dedicated to creating visual experiences that effectively tell our clients’ stories while engaging, exciting, and enticing their customers. Our firm consists of the top web design and development, WordPress, search engine optimization (SEO), and copy writing professionals. Our founder, Andrew Behla, has worked in the graphic, print and web design industry for over twenty years. For more information about how to start an online business, contact Behla Design.